Trump’s base would applaud an emergency. But Democrats...

1of2President Trump, surrounded by GOP lawmakers, talks to reporters at the Capitol, on the day he stormed out of a negotiating session with Democrats over his demand for a wall on the Mexican border.Photo: Olivier Douliery / Abaca Press / TNS

After President Trump walked out on a negotiation session with Democrats on Wednesday over the government shutdown, his best chance to secure funding for a border wall might be declaring a national emergency on the southern border.

“I don’t think Republicans care how he gets wall funding, as long as he gets it done,” John Thomas, a GOP pollster and consultant in Los Angeles, said Wednesday. “Trump has to deliver some kind of win on this issue, or it’s not going to be Ann Coulter leaving him. He will lose some of his base.

“This is a do-or-die moment for him,” Thomas said.

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But it’s not just Republicans who see political benefit from Trump declaring a national emergency. There’s a potential upside for Democrats, too: The shutdown would end, they wouldn’t have to approve a dime for wall funding, and they could continue to campaign against a project that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, calls immoral.

Keeping the issue alive while solving the shutdown impasse could be the best of both worlds, some Democrats think.

“It’s like when (President) George W. Bush used to talk about privatizing Social Security. It was an unpopular issue to start with that got more unpopular the more he talked about it,” said Ben Tulchin, a San Francisco Democratic pollster who has worked for national campaigns, including Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential run.

Trump shrugs off that opposition. He cares more that nearly 80 percent of Republicans — his base — support the wall. That’s why on Wednesday, Trump amplified the prospect of using his authority to declare an emergency to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. He said his “threshold” for declaring an emergency would be if he can’t work out a deal with Democrats.

“And if we don’t, I may go that route,” Trump said. “I have the absolute right to do national emergency if I want.”

That may not be the strongest legal ground. But politically, Trump knows who his audience is.

“If I did something that was foolish, like gave up on border security, the first ones that would hit me would be my senators — they’d be angry at me,” Trump said during a bill-signing ceremony in the White House. “The second ones would be the House. And the third ones would be, frankly, my base and a lot of Republicans out there and a lot of Democrats that want to see border security.”

And his base needs to see Trump win funding for his signature issue — or at least politically die trying.

“If the courts were to reject it right away, that would be bad,” Thomas said, “because it would call into question his competence.”

However, if the issue wended its way through the court system for a while — even if it were ultimately spiked — Trump “still would be able to spin that as a win on his side,” Thomas said. “He would say that ‘the obstructionist Democrats wouldn’t do anything, so I went ahead and got it done anyways.’ He might lose some of his base, but I think they would eventually forgive him.”

In fact, the base is far from convinced that it’s in the minority on the wall or the shutdown.

Travis Allen, a Republican assemblyman from Huntington Beach (Orange County) who ran for governor last year, is a die-hard Trump supporter who is convinced that “the polls are wrong.”

“Very simply, everyone knows that walls work. Steel barriers work,” said Allen, a leading contender to be the next chair of the California Republican Party. “We need to know who comes into our country. This is the solution that will work.”

Allen refused to consider that the courts would rule against Trump on an emergency declaration. “I believe that the president will succeed, even through the courts,” he said.

Democrats are happy to wait out the legal wrangling. And if Trump doesn’t go that route, Democratic partisans think the party’s strategy of passing individual spending bills for agencies that have nothing to do with border security but are shut down anyway will give them the high ground.

“It makes Democrats seem like the levelheaded, pragmatic ones,” said Dave Jacobson, a Democratic strategist in Los Angeles who ran campaigns in six states last year.

And in the long run, Trump declaring a national emergency based on shaky assertions that criminals and drugs are pouring over unsecured areas of the border may play badly in two states with surging Latino turnout that are crucial to the president’s 2020 re-election chances.

“In 2020, states like Arizona and Texas are going to be critical,” said Sonja Diaz, director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. “This is going to be very impactful on who they choose on that ballot.”

Joe Garofoli is the San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer, covering national and state politics. He has worked at The Chronicle since 2000 and in Bay Area journalism since 1992, when he left the Milwaukee Journal. He is the host of “It’s All Political,” The Chronicle’s political podcast. Catch it here: bit.ly/2LSAUjA

He has won numerous awards and covered everything from fashion to the Jeffrey Dahmer serial killings to two Olympic Games to his own vasectomy — which he discussed on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” after being told he couldn’t say the word “balls” on the air. He regularly appears on Bay Area radio and TV talking politics and is available to entertain at bar mitzvahs and First Communions. He is a graduate of Northwestern University and a proud native of Pittsburgh. Go Steelers!